The Struggle to Belong Dealing with Diversity in 21St Century Urban Settings

The struggle to belong Dealing with diversity in 21st century urban settings. Amsterdam, 7-9 July 2011 Difference and Division: representing Irishness in Belfast’s Gaeltacht Quarter Siun Carden Queen's University Belfast Paper presented at the International RC21 conference 2011 Session: nr. 23, “Political culture and contention in cities” Difference and Division: representing Irishness in Belfast’s Gaeltacht Quarter ABSTRACT This paper examines a place-making project in post-conflict Belfast, analyzing efforts to transform an area which has often been used as a byword for militant Irish nationalism and social deprivation into an inclusive, vibrant tourist destination and cultural hub themed around the Irish language (called the „Gaeltacht Quarter‟). The antagonistic and territorial assumptions about place that characterize divided cities now co-exist with global trends towards the commodification of difference as recreation or spectacle, and longstanding struggles over the representation of contested identities are intertwined with the struggle to compete for international tourism and investment. The proliferation of officially themed quarters in many cities across the world reflects the enthusiasm with which planning authorities have embraced the vision of difference as a benign resource for the creation of tourist revenue. Yet, analysis of „quartering‟ processes reveals that such commodification does not neutralise or evade the political potency of naming, representing and spatially delimiting cultural difference. Indeed, this paper argues that such projects offer a valuable insight into the inseparable roles of physical and representational space as both loci and catalysts of contestation in urban conflicts. Bringing together a wide range of public and private interest groups, projects redefining parts of Belfast as distinctive quarters have been explicitly linked with efforts to deterritorialize the city. The creation of bounded, themed spaces as an attempt to leave behind the ethno-sectarian geographical segregation that parts of Belfast still experience has its particular ironies, but is in many ways typical of contemporary trends in urban planning. The Gaeltacht Quarter exemplifies both the importance and the challenge of representation within cities where culturally distinguishing features have acted as markers of violent division, and where negotiations about how to successfully encompass difference necessarily address multiple local and international audiences simultaneously. Introduction This paper considers a place-making project in Belfast, Northern Ireland, asking how the contestation over physical and representational space (Neill 1999) that is so often a feature of life in cities, and which becomes so urgent in situations of violent conflict and its aftermath, relates to the simultaneous trend towards the celebration and commoditization of locally rooted and spatially bounded cultural identities. Over the last decade or so, twenty-first century Belfast has experienced a transition away from decades of sustained political violence, and this slow and patchy process of attempted deterritorialization has coincided with an international fashion for the deliberate „theming‟ of city space. A reassessment of political and cultural representation for competing ethno-national aspirations has inevitably been part of the shift away from violence in this polarized city (Boal 1994). The continuing struggle for symbolic territory, which can be seen as a competitive quest for both the moral high ground and an audience to address from it, is indivisible from the emergence of the city into a regional and global economic landscape from which it was isolated, in some significant senses, throughout the forty-odd years of the Troubles. There has been a rapid spate of planning and tourism development that address the need for post-industrial cities to market „cultural identities‟ in lieu of other products. These are taking place in a context where even banal, bureaucratic decision-making about urban space is haunted by the „desperate spatial sorting process‟ (Murtagh 2000: 190; see also Boal and Livingstone 1984: 172; O‟Dowd and Kamarovna 2009: 9) with which the Troubles began, and which solidified over the following decades into a stubborn, if unstable, „patchwork‟ city (Hepburn 1994). This paper does not argue that all of this makes Belfast a special case; on the contrary, rather, the particular research value of Belfast is as a place in which many of the recurring issues of urban theory and place research can be studied, in historically condensed and physically concrete forms. In this paper, I will concentrate on one of those issues: how the contemporary race to identify cultural „USPs‟ with which to „sell‟ cities (Kearns and Philo, 1993) relates to older, less comfortable forms of urban boundary-making. Background to Belfast’s Gaeltacht Quarter Bell and Jayne (2004) have identified the „quartering‟ of cities as a pervasive urban regeneration strategy across the UK, and it is one that Belfast was quick to adopt in the rush to regenerate the city which took place in the wake of the peace process (Neill 1999) . A mixture of business people, local politicians, regeneration and tourism professionals took to the idea of „quartering‟ so eagerly that we now have „seven…and counting!‟ (www.barnabasventures.com, 10/07/2009). I will focus on one Quarter in particular, the Gaeltacht Quarter, because it highlights how the fashion for cherishing localized difference in a way which combines elements of nostalgia, aspiration, consumerism and idealism does not erase the antagonistic, territorial and exclusionary aspects of urban place identifications with which we are also familiar, but intertwines with them in interesting ways. This project is unique among Belfast‟s seven Quarters in that its physical location already has a powerful place identity which is intertwined with the city‟s history of conflict, and in that its designated theme relates to the very question of national identity on which conflict in and over Belfast rests. The word „Gaeltacht‟ is the Irish language word for an Irish-speaking area or community, and the Gaeltacht Quarter is based on the Falls Road in West Belfast, an area that played a particular part in the conflict (if West Belfast was „the “cockpit of the North”…then the Falls was the pilot‟s seat‟, Livingstone 1998:24). The name of this road has been incessantly, and often lazily, used as a shorthand for militant Irish republicanism in journalism and local political discourse. The idea of a „Gaeltacht Quarter‟ was first proposed in 2002, in a report by the West Belfast and Greater Shankill Task Force. (This group was set up in 2001 by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Industry and the Department of Social Development to look at ways to reduce deprivation in West Belfast as a whole.) Clive Dutton, an English urban regeneration expert, was commissioned to produce a report, published in 2004, on how a Gaeltacht Quarter on the Falls Road might work. When my preliminary research began in 2006, a limited company called An Cheathrú Ghaeltachta Teo („The Gaeltacht Quarter Ltd‟) had been set up to manage the development. This was loosely based on the recommendations of the Dutton Report (2004), but represented a scaling back of that report‟s ambitions in terms of the number of government departments and local interest groups directly involved. Seo Chugainn An mBéal Feirste Nua One of the unusual features of the Gaeltacht Quarter is that it has relied on co- operation between government agencies and Falls Road- or Irish language-based „community‟ organisations from the very beginning. It is now lead principally by the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure and Forbairt Feirste, a West Belfast Irish language development organisation, which aims „to unleash the socio-economic power of Belfast‟s Irish speaking community to the benefit of the entire city‟ and uses the slogan „Seo chugainn an Béal Feirste Nua‟, („Here comes the new Belfast‟) (www.forbairstfeirste.com/about). This declaration of a „new Belfast‟ in the Irish language, through which Irish is linked with „socio-economic power‟ and proclaimed as a resource for „the entire city‟, marks both a transformation in the role of Irishness in this cityscape, and the latest phase in a very old story of jostling for nationally identified space in the city. As a symbol of Irish nationhood, the place of the Irish language in Belfast has always been a politically and emotionally sensitive subject for many of the city‟s inhabitants. McCoy (1997:120) points out that for fifty years of Unionist „hegemony‟, Irish was actively denied a place in „public life‟, to the extent that in 1948 street signs in „languages other than English‟ were specifically banned. During the decades of political violence, the enthusiastic adoption of Irish by some republican prisoners contributed to both a resurgence of interest in the language among nationalists, and an increased fear of the language among unionists. Objections to the Gaeltacht Quarter project have included Unionist fears of Irish incursions into the UK state. DUP councillor Nelson McCausland commented on early proposals in 2002: „I am trying to find out…if this is the first step towards getting the Dublin Government to recognise a Gaeltacht Quarter here‟ (Andersonstown News 26/08/02: 3). The process through which pre-existing Irish language spaces, organizations and activities around the Falls Road are reframed and transformed through

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